Challenges & Benchmarking

The rapid growth and availability of biomedical and molecular data has motivated the computational community to develop many novel tools and methods. With algorithms playing an increasing role in biomedical analysis and patient care, there’s a need to earn trust with a rigorous and transparent framework for evaluating the real-world capabilities of these algorithms. Public benchmarking provides the research community with a way to objectively assess the relative merits and limitations of different methodologies. Community Challenges are a proven approach to focus attention with deadlines and incentives, encouraging new and diverse contributions from researchers.

Sage Bionetworks has pioneered the development of concepts and infrastructure to objectively evaluate algorithms across a broad spectrum of biomedical domains, including bioinformatics, biomedical informatics, medical imaging, and clinical trials. As a trusted partner in hosting challenges and benchmarking initiatives, Sage serves as an honest broker between data generators, owners, and modelers.

We combine technology with biomedical and data science expertise to facilitate the objective assessment of algorithms on critical data sets, including proprietary data and algorithms that cannot be broadly shared. These assessments serve the biomedical community in defining standards and benchmarks, and in guiding future algorithm development.